Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple did not need NeXT, the company that provided the foundation for Mac OS X; he argues that System 7 wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be. Wozniak also says that Mac OS 9 was more secure than OS X is now: Mac OS X is built in Unix and is therefore more prone to attacks because people are familiar with the holes in Unix, explained Woznaik. "Some of the holes in Unix are well known. So keeping Firewalls on is more important. And we keep announcing, even our own security fixes, not as many as Microsoft but still we never really had those in the OS 9 days."

"Secondly, you have to admit that OSX is ten times the OS that OS9 was, you really can't compare them. The more features you have the more little bugs will sneak in the door."

I'm not a programmer, nor am I a mac user, but I did learn C for a couple of months on PowerMacs, a few years back. In CodeWarrior, running on top of (I think) OS8. Well any memory allocation mistake in my (crappy) code used to bring the entire system down at runtime. Fatal error message with the bomb and all.

It may have been more secure at the time, but there was probably not much that could be saved under the hood...